Hot Cocoa: Resilient Chocolate Won’t Melt in Your Hands

One of the pitfalls of a love for chocolate is that you often can’t take it with you– especially if you live in a warmer climate. As nice as it might be to keep a bit of your favorite treat on hand, in your bag or in a pocket, most people find the stuff somewhat less enjoyable when it melts and turns into a gooey mess.

Cadbury thinks they have the answer, and it’s about time. The cocoa giant has filed a patent for much more temperature-resilient chocolate, which could not only change attitudes about chocolate snacks in the summer months, but might open up opportunities in several rather warm regions where chocolate is consumed less often in the ways some in the west are used to.

The process of making chocolate a bit more durable takes place almost exclusively in the refining stage, by cutting the fat, so to speak. The main reason chocolate melts at temperatures in the low 90s is due to the fat content which normally coats the sugar particles of processed chocolate. Cadbury calls this a re-refining process, wherein they create a more stable structure of sugar with less fat overall. When chocolate has been re-refined, it begins to melt at the much higher temperature of about 104 degrees fahrenheit.

It seems like a handy bonus that the fat content is lessened as well, giving this new and more hardy chocolate the potential to also be a more health-conscious choice at the end of the day. We’re running out of reasons not to indulge.

It’s important that the flavor still be there, because making sacrifices to taste might render the whole thing a moot point. I don’t think there is much of a market out there for slightly less melty chocolate if it doesn’t taste just as good as what a person is used to. Some people might settle for less than stellar chocolate for the convenience, but that doesn’t seem to be much of a worry here anyhow; this chocolate should not taste different at all.

Other companies, like Kraft, have in the past looked to solve the problem of chocolate’s tendency to go soft through the packaging rather than the product, but it’s a less than perfect solution for many. Especially if one wants to hold a piece of chocolate in their hand for a few minutes while they enjoy it one nibble at a time.

This new method and its results will particularly benefit Cadbury in regions like Brazil, India, and other countries where it gets very hot for much of the year. In many parts of the world chocolate consumption is slightly held back by this very gooey dilemma, but that could be a thing of the past.

While you might still find yourself with a bit of a mess on the hottest days of the year, for most people the 104 degree mark falls well under expected highs for much of the summer. Besides, when it’s that hot out I start to feel like I’m melting a little myself.